READING – We are still about a month away from pitchers and catchers reporting, and where major league baseball teams are concerned, everything seems possible.

Especially if your name happens to be Rhys Hoskins.

During an appearance with the Phillies’ Caravan on Tuesday night, a fan asked the team’s young slugger just how many homers he planned to hit this season. Hoskins deferred to another member of the Phils’ traveling party, who put the number at 65.

“So,” Hoskins said with a smile, “let’s go with 65.”

He was kidding, but it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. Not after the 24-year-old went deep 18 times in 50 games as a rookie last season, following an Aug. 10 call-up from Triple-A Lehigh Valley.

And not only that, but he became the fastest player in major league history to hit nine career homers (16 games). And the fastest to hit 10 (17 games). And the fastest to hit 11 (18 games). He tied a team record with five bombs in as many games in one stretch, and also homered in eight of nine.

All of this awakened a team limping toward a 66-96 finish, the fifth straight season in which the Phillies failed to breach the .500 mark.

“He steps into the box, and we as players on the bench look at each other with blank stares, thinking without saying any words, ‘Is he going to do it again?’ ” said pitcher Jerad Eickhoff, who also appeared Tuesday night. “And sure enough, more times than not he was doing it again. It was very special to be a part of it.”

Gabe Kapler, hired last Oct. 30 as the team’s new manager, looked on from afar.

“I think you’d have to be living under a rock to not notice the damage that Rhys was doing on a regular basis,” said Kapler, the Dodgers’ Director of Player Development the last four years. “It didn’t come out of nowhere. This is a guy who performed at the minor league level as well. He’s basically hit wherever he’s gone.”

Which is true. Hoskins, a fifth-round pick out of Sacramento State in 2014, had rocketed through the minors, and was hitting .284 with 29 homers and 91 RBIs in 115 games for the IronPigs when he was called up.

Still, no one could have expected such a splashy debut. While he was in the midst of it, he said, his approach was simple: “Don’t think.”

Which is very Crash Davis-like: Don’t think. It can only hurt the ballclub.

“I kind of just remember thinking at times, ‘Is this really happening?’” he said. “And we’d wake up and go to the ballpark, and do it again.”

It was, he admitted, “pure bliss” and “a perfect storm.”

So much so that Hoskins, a natural first baseman, even started the 14th triple play in team history on Aug. 27 from left field, a position he was forced to play with Tommy Joseph manning first. In all Hoskins played all or part of 30 games in left, after appearing in three at that position for Lehigh Valley. It marked the first time he had played there since his freshman year of college.

The expectation was that he would have first to himself this year, but the team signed another first baseman, Carlos Santana, away from Cleveland on Dec. 20. That would appear to mean that Hoskins will once again play left, though Kapler would only say Tuesday that he regards him as “a flexible asset” who can fill both spots and perhaps even play right on occasion. Nor would the new skipper rule out using Santana in right.

One thing Kapler does regard as certain is that both guys will work the count and grind out at-bats – and that some others, like Cesar Hernandez and J.P. Crawford, will do the same.

“That feels like a lineup that might begin to make the opposition fearful,” Kapler said.

Forgotten, at least for now, is that Hoskins went 7 for 52 (.135) and was homerless over his last 16 games of 2017, dropping his average from .314 to .259.

“It’s just a game of adjustments,” he said. “They made adjustments. I missed pitches. When you miss pitches, you get yourself in a hole. It’s hard to get out of it.”

But when he was going good, he said, “I just was missing barely any at all.”

It’s January, and it seems possible that that will happen again. Everything does.